1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a liquid crystal display device and an electronic apparatus, and more particularly, to the structure of a vertical-alignment-type liquid crystal display device.
2. Related Art
A transflective liquid crystal display device having both a reflective mode and a transmissive mode has been known as an example of a liquid crystal display device. However, such a liquid crystal display device has a problem in that the viewing angle is narrow in transmissive display. That is, if a transflective plate is provided on the inner surface of a liquid crystal cell to prevent the generation of parallax, then reflective display should be performed using only one polarizing plate provided at the observer side. However, this restricts the degree of freedom of the optical design. In order to solve this problem, liquid crystal display devices using homeotropic liquid crystal have been disclosed in the following documents: Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2002-350853, Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. 2000-40428, and “Development of transflective LCD for high contrast and wide viewing angle by using homeotropic alignment”, M. Jisaki et al., Asia Display/IDW′01, pp. 133–136 (2001).
A vertical-alignment-type liquid crystal display device is a liquid crystal display device adopting a ‘VA (Vertical Alignment) mode’. That is, the liquid crystal molecules have a negative dielectric anisotropy and so are vertically aligned with respect to a substrate when no voltage is applied and are inclined when a voltage is applied. In the liquid crystal display device disclosed in these documents, a transmissive display region is formed, for example, in a regular octagon shape, and a projection is provided at the center of each transmissive display region on a counter electrode to incline the liquid crystal molecules in the eight directions. This is called an ‘alignment division structure’ and enables the viewing angle to be widened.
Of course, in the above-mentioned documents, in order to allow circularly polarized light to be incident on a liquid crystal layer, a circular polarizing plate formed by combining a linearly polarizing plate with a quarter-wave plate (retardation plate) is provided on the outer surface of a substrate. The characteristics of the circularly polarizing plate have a great effect on the viewing angle characteristic. However, the above-mentioned documents do not describe the detailed structure of the circularly polarizing plate and have a problem in that contrast may be lowered in accordance with the viewing angle. That is, since the circularly polarizing plate allows circularly polarized light to be incident on the liquid crystal layer, it is possible to obtain normal display regardless of which direction the circularly polarizing plate faces. However, since a user views an image through the linearly polarizing plate, the contrast depends on the viewing angle. When viewing a display device, it is necessary that the contrast characteristic be particularly symmetric in the horizontal direction. Thus, it is desirable to realize a liquid crystal display device having such a viewing angle characteristic. The transflective liquid crystal display device has been given as an example in the above statement. However, the above-mentioned problems can arise in a transmissive liquid crystal display device as well as a transflective liquid crystal display device.